Today is all about transforming digital humanities. While often questions arise around access and making infrastructure available, there is a growing need for critical review of digital research work. What does it mean to put your work online, to promote openness and access. Here are some critical views on digital academic work.

Eric Kansa, director of Open Contexttells us why just ‘putting it out there’ is not enough. Kansa critiques the neoliberal approach governments and big companies seem to take to openness, reducing open access to a method of profit maximization while exploiting academic researchers and condemning whistle-blowers. read on here

as if to underline his argument, Nina Curley from WAMDA, as well as global voices writer Leila Nachawati write about blocked internet access in so-called ‘sanctioned countries’ like Syria and Iran, where the academic online learning platform Coursera is currently not available due to US economic and trade sanctions. see the wamda blog for up-to-date information on the topic. To hear Nachawatis critique on Coursera letting the sanctions from the US hijack their mission “to change the world by educating millions of people by offering classes from top universities and professors online for free”, click here.

and in other news, its always fun to follow the #transformDH tumblr, which shows best practice examples of digital scholarship and the implementation of digital tools for academia. The tumblr collects and distributes links, stories and ideas around digital humanities and can be viewed via http://transformdh.tumblr.com/